Didn't See That Coming

Alabama-Auburn.  Holy Shit.

A Stock Bubble?

While this rally is impressive (and scary), it is below average historically (Chart of the Day, via Ritholtz):

Note: historical performance does not predict future returns. 

An OSU-Michigan Tradition

Bob Wojnowski's OSU slamfest:

As thousands of scarlet-nosed Ohioans truck into town, clogging the White Castles, it’s important to remind our friends of a couple rules.

■No. 1, Tasers are not toys, not even after 16 beers.

■No. 2, we strictly enforce BYOPP (Bring Your Own Porta-Potty).

Thankfully, our state gets two shots at the unbeaten Buckeyes this year, and the Wolverines could use the help. I’m not saying they’ve been playing possum, because that sounds like a jab at the second-most popular Thanksgiving dish in Ohio. But maybe the 7-4 Wolverines cleverly saved all their good plays — you know, the ones that go forward — for The Game on Saturday.

The hope is, Michigan at least can soften up Ohio State with a series of glancing body blows, and then Michigan State can finish the job next week in the Big Ten championship game. The Spartans made a horrible miscalculation and clinched early, so they’ll warm up Saturday by whacking the Gophers in front of a tidy gathering of family and friends.

If you think Michigan, a two-touchdown underdog, is afraid of Ohio State, ha, you don’t understand this great rivalry. First of all, once you’ve rushed for minus-69 yards in back-to-back games, you’re not afraid of any embarrassment. And second — and I mean this in the most-respectful way — Ohio State is in the midst of the worst 23-game winning streak in college football history.

Am I being too harsh? Not really. I’ve done investigatory work with my assistant — the talented Ms. G. Oogle — and in this 23-game stretch, Ohio State has precisely one notable road victory — in overtime against Wisconsin last year. This season’s slate includes the standard Big Ten wrecks, as well as the likes of Buffalo, California, San Diego State and Florida A&M. Cripes, why not just complete the cupcake run and schedule Florida?

Considering how bad Michigan has been recently, this is a pretty impressive effort. Of course, he ends up picking OSUto win, 24-9.

Sharpeneing Pencils for a Living?

Apparently (not that I understand it):

HOW TO SHARPEN PENCILS from Pricefilms on Vimeo.

The Voice of the NYC Subway

This makes me wonder who the lady was who said, "Welcome to Riverfront Stadium. Cans, bottles and alcoholic beverages are not permitted to be brought into the stadium. Welcome to Riverfront Stadium......."

Indiana Police Chief Gets Tasered For Fundraiser

AP:

Knightstown police Chief Danny Baker has used pig roasts and golf tournaments to augment his department's shrinking budget, but badly in need of $9,000 for a new squad car, he's reprising his most shocking fundraising approach to date: getting shot by a stun gun.
The jocular 63-year-old chief and another Knightstown official were planning to have a detective shoot them with a Taser at a free event Wednesday night in the middle school gym in their small eastern Indiana town. Spectators — who Baker hopes feel compelled to donate — will get a firsthand look at how 50,000 volts of low-amp electricity affects the human body.
"It's a shame we have to go to the extent of having fundraisers and getting electrified and so forth, but with small-town budgets you have to do something to get by," said Baker, a lifelong Knightstown resident who has been in law enforcement for 35 years.
Many rural communities like Knightstown, a mile-square town of 2,100 about 25 miles east of Indianapolis, are having to become inventive to fund needed services, said Brian Depew, executive director of the Center for Rural Affairs, an advocacy group based in Lyons, Neb.
Depew said federal farm bill funding for rural development has fallen by a third since 2003, leaving less money for police cars and other necessities in an era of shrinking rural populations and tax bases.
Some communities have taken to putting ads on cruisers, while others, like Knightstown, are relying on donations for help.

Why is their funding drying up?  For that, they can thank the Republicans they keep voting in office.  Anyway, here's what he raised:

 A police chief of a small eastern Indiana town who was shot by a stun gun at fundraising event to buy a new squad car says he raised about $800 in cash and received a $25,000 pledge from a Texas company.
Knightstown Police Chief Danny Baker says he's been receiving calls from all over the country and expects to collect more money. His goal was to raise $9,000 so the town of about 2,100 people about 25 miles east of Indianapolis could lease a new squad car. He says he might be able to get a second car.

This isn't the way to run a country.

Turkey Drop

Thanksgiving From the Outside

Slate tries to describe Thanksgiving in the way U.S. media would cover a similar event in another country:

WASHINGTON, D.C., United States—On Wednesday morning, this normally bustling capital city became a ghost town as most of its residents embarked on the long journey to their home villages for an annual festival of family, food, and questionable historical facts. Experts say the day is vital for understanding American society and economists are increasingly taking note of its impact on the world economy.

The annual holiday, known as Thanksgiving, celebrates a mythologized moment of peace between America’s early foreign settlers and its native groups—a day that by Americans' own admission preceded a near genocide of those groups. Despite its murky origins, the holiday remains a rare institution celebrated almost universally in this ethnically diverse society.

During the holiday, more than 38.4 million Americans will make the long pilgrimage home, traveling an average of 214 miles over congested highways, often in inclement weather. The more prosperous citizens will frequently opt for the nation's airways, suffering through a series of flight delays and missed airline connections thanks to the country’s decaying transportation infrastructure and residual fears of foreign terrorist attacks.

Yeah, that covers it pretty well.

Why Did the Detroit Lions Start Playing on Thanksgiving?

They needed a crowd:

In 1934, radio executive G.A. Richards bought the Portsmouth, Ohio Spartans NFL team, moved them to Detroit, and renamed them the Lions.  Unfortunately for him, nobody in Detroit cared much for watching the Lions.  Despite winning all their games but one before Thanksgiving, having several stars of the day, and one super star in Earl “Dutch” Clark, the average turn out for each game was only around 12,000 people.
At the time, it was fairly traditional for various football programs in high schools and colleges to hold particularly significant games on Thanksgiving.  So Richards decided to try to bring this same tradition to the NFL, convincing the NFL to allow the Lions and the defending World Champion Chicago Bears to play for the Western Division championship on Thanksgiving.
Richards then used his considerable influence in radio to convince NBC that they should broadcast this game on the radio all across the United States, something that had never been done before for an NFL game.  The game ended up being a huge success, being played at the University of Detroit Stadium in front of a sold out crowd of 26,000 fans and broadcast across the nation on over 94 different radio stations.  In the end, the Bears won 19-16, but the game was such a success, as far as ratings and fan turn-out went, that Richards fought to be allowed to continue having the Lions play on Thanksgiving going forward and to continue to have that games broadcast out on the radio nationwide.

An additional bit of Thanksgiving football information:

 Football was actually traditionally played on Thanksgiving long before the NFL ever existed.  As early as 1902 it was common for such leagues as the National Football League (not to be confused with our current National Football League) to use Thanksgiving as their championship game day.  Interestingly, this league was funded by Major League Baseball.  Another league, called the Ohio League, liked to match their best teams together for Thanksgiving games.  Many other such leagues also did the same thing.  As noted, it was also common among many colleges and high schools to hold annual Thanksgiving football games.

More on the Portsmouth Spartans here.  More Thanksgiving facts here (h/t Ritholtz).  Every year, the Lions game rouses grandpa to say that back in the day, the Lions played the Packers every year.  From 1951-1963, he's right.  But in other years, not so much.  Since they are playing this year, he might or might not say it.  I'm counting on him asking what kind of cheese we're eating (Havarti), then telling us he's never had it before, even though he has, each of the last ten years or so.  Finally, I predict he'll be asleep within 25 minutes of finishing supper.  God bless grandpa and the predictability of our holidays.

Update:  I went down to mom and dad's at lunchtime, and grandpa was already there.  We had something to eat, then at 12:47, grandpa said that every year Detroit played Chicago (oops, I had the wrong longtime rival).  That was before we even turned on the game.  At 1:15, grandpa was taking a nap.  When I left to feed the cows, mom hadn't put the cheese out yet.  I'll have to head back down and partake of that holiday tradition.

Happy Thanksgiving

Small Town

National Geographic Photo Contest, Part 2

Best one I saw:

The Messengers: Taken on May 26th, 2013, this was a dissipating low precipitation thunderstorm near Broken Bow, Nebraska, that produced one of the best lightning shows I have ever witnessed in my storm chasing career. Even more beautiful was when the lightning lit up these incredible mammatus clouds in the night sky. These type of clouds are often associated with severe thunderstorms, and their ominous and foreboding appearance is a message to all that severe weather may be on its way. (© Anne Goforth/National Geographic Photo Contest) #

More here.

 

Investment Bubble Chart of the Day

Here you go:

 You know, I don't know about much, but Bitcoin is a joke.

SODA / POP / COKE

After reading about the survey a while back, every time it rains when the sun shines, I say, "The devil's beating his wife."

And I pronounce wash "worsh."

Our Brains Screw Us Up

Here's a really nice summary of various ways our brains make us irrational.  And this story claims the smarter you are, the more likely you are to fall into these traps:

Perhaps our most dangerous bias is that we naturally assume that everyone else is more susceptible to thinking errors, a tendency known as the “bias blind spot.” This “meta-bias” is rooted in our ability to spot systematic mistakes in the decisions of others—we excel at noticing the flaws of friends—and inability to spot those same mistakes in ourselves. Although the bias blind spot itself isn’t a new concept, West’s latest paper demonstrates that it applies to every single bias under consideration, from anchoring to so-called “framing effects.” In each instance, we readily forgive our own minds but look harshly upon the minds of other people.
And here’s the upsetting punch line: intelligence seems to make things worse. The scientists gave the students four measures of “cognitive sophistication.” As they report in the paper, all four of the measures showed positive correlations, “indicating that more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.” This trend held for many of the specific biases, indicating that smarter people (at least as measured by S.A.T. scores) and those more likely to engage in deliberation were slightly more vulnerable to common mental mistakes. Education also isn’t a savior; as Kahneman and Shane Frederick first noted many years ago, more than fifty per cent of students at Harvard, Princeton, and M.I.T. gave the incorrect answer to the bat-and-ball question.
What explains this result? One provocative hypothesis is that the bias blind spot arises because of a mismatch between how we evaluate others and how we evaluate ourselves.

Good thing I'm pretty dumb.

Carbon Source Nations Chart

From Bloomberg Businessweek, via Ritholtz:

Nearly half of all the carbon emissions come from the world's three largest nations.  Guess that isn't too surprising.  It's just notable how much more per capita the U.S. emits versus the two nations with more than three times its population.

More Catholic Than I Think?

It looks like the Pope and I agree on a few things:

Pope Francis is once again shaking things up in the Catholic Church. On Tuesday, he issued his first “apostolic exhortation,” declaring a new enemy for the Catholic Church: modern capitalism. “Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world,” he wrote. “This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system.”
He couldn't be much clearer. The pope has taken a firm political stance against right-leaning, pro-free market economic policies, and his condemnation appears to be largely pointed at Europe and the United States. His explicit reference to “trickle-down” economic policies—the hallmark of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and their political successors—is just the beginning: Throughout 224 pages on the future of the Church, he condemns income inequality, “the culture of prosperity,” and “a financial system which rules rather than serves.”
Taken in the context of the last half-century of Roman Catholicism, this is a radical move. Fifty years ago, around the time of the Second Vatican Council, Church leaders quietly declared a very different economic enemy: communism. But Pope Francis’s communitarian, populist message shows just how far the Church has shifted in five decades—and how thoroughly capitalism has displaced communism as a monolithic political philosophy.

This will burn up the conservatives.  But shit, who can claim that "trickle down economics" works?  We've got over thirty years of it not working, and we keep being told that it will work with one more tax cut.  Bullshit.  Taxes should go up on the very high end of the income range.  You don't have to be the Vicar of Christ to figure that shit out, but I'm glad he's out there pointing out the shortcomings of our supposedly capitalist economy.

Hard Rock Huletts

Can Dr. Mann Save The Huletts? from Jerry Mann on Vimeo.

More on the Hulett unloaders here. Video from Major League featuring the Huletts here.

A Strange Saint Story

The tale of St. Thomas More's beard:

His beard is shrouded in mystery. What he did with it is simply amazing.
Henry VIII condemned St. Thomas More to death after he refused to deny papal supremacy. More had been confined in the Tower of London for over a year (hence the beard, and why it’s not pictured). As the executioner lifted his axe, More asked him to wait. The blindfolded saint-to-be carefully laid his beard on the outside of the block, out of the executioner’s path. "This hath not offended the king," he quipped, thus protecting his beard from the blade.
Then the axe fell.
You read that correctly. His last words before beholding the Beatific Vision were a beard joke. While that might not fit the modern notion of a saint, it completely matches his personality. One biographer wrote, “"that innocent mirth which had been so conspicuous in his life, did not forsake him to the last . . .his death was of a piece with his life.”
Please remember this the next time someone tries to say holiness and humor do not mix.
And then spend some time contemplating St. Thomas More's glorified heavenly beard.

While there is some humor to be had there, I prefer the story of the martyrdom of St. Lawrence for saintly humor:

A well-known legend has persisted from earliest times. As deacon in Rome, Lawrence was charged with the responsibility for the material goods of the Church, and the distribution of alms to the poor. St. Ambrose of Milan relates that when St. Lawrence was asked for the treasures of the Church he brought forward the poor, among whom he had divided the treasure as alms. "Behold in these poor persons the treasures which I promised to show you; to which I will add pearls and precious stones, those widows and consecrated virgins, which are the church’s crown." The prefect was so angry that he had a great gridiron prepared, with coals beneath it, and had Lawrence’s body placed on it (hence St. Lawrence's association with the gridiron). After the martyr had suffered the pain for a long time, the legend concludes, he made his famous cheerful remark, “I'm well done. Turn me over!” From this derives his patronage of cooks and chefs.

 He is sometimes considered a patron saint of comedians, although being the patron saint of cooks and chefs is darkly humorous, too.

Balancing Wind and Gas Generation

National Journal:

Managing wind power makes flying a kite look easy.
Wind usually blows the most between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. when people need electricity the least. But every now and then, the weather gets surprisingly windy at other times. That's when a handful of people on the 10th floor of a downtown Denver office building suddenly get very busy.
"They're really scrambling during that time frame," said Mike Boughner, Xcel Energy's manager of generation control and dispatch, while giving a recent tour of the company's "trading floor," where traders buy and sell electricity and other employees manage the power of the company's entire electric-grid operations throughout the Western and Central U.S., 24 hours a day, seven days a week. "They're calling all the plants, both natural gas and coal, and telling them to back down as fast as they can."...
This is where natural gas comes in, which can be turned on and off more quickly than coal and nuclear. It's also cheaper than nuclear and cleaner than coal.
Pointing to one of many large screens in the room, Boughner said: "This shows the flexible gas-fired combustion turbines that the operator uses to fill in the gaps and respond to variabilities in the wind."
In addition to natural gas, Xcel also uses a hydroelectricity dam in the nearby Rocky Mountains as backup power to wind, which in a roundabout way is actually powered by wind. But natural gas is the primary source used by Xcel—and the country—to use when the wind dies down.
These two energy resources have long been considered a good match on the grid, and Xcel Energy is on the forefront of testing the boundaries of this relationship. Until technology offers a way to store renewable energy on a wide scale, wind needs natural gas.
"We'd have blackouts," Boughner said when asked what would happen if Xcel didn't have natural gas to back up wind. "We would definitely have events where we would have to shut off the lights."
But wind helps natural gas, too, in different ways. It has no carbon emissions, which helps utilities comply with stricter environmental rules and combat global warming. It also has a cost benefit. Even though the country is awash in shale gas and prices are at near-record lows, utilities remember that just a handful of years ago prices were five or six times what they are today. They don't want to depend too much on gas.
"We look at wind as a hedge for natural gas," said Eves. "So with some of these low-cost wind farms, that's the equivalent of locking in a $4.50 gas price for 25 years. It's an unbelievable hedge."

This highlights some of the things I was talking about yesterday. It would be interesting if the article went into a little more detail when it says the hydroelectric dam is powered by wind in a roundabout way.  I would assume that means they are using excess wind power to pump water into the reservoir, but they don't really say.  Anyway, in the Great Plains they are going to be generating a significant amount of electricity with wind turbines.

Purdue's Drum Ain't That Large

A Big Lie Written on a Drum

The Boilermakers exaggerate massively (besides when they claim to be the best engineering school in Indiana):

They parade it proudly through the campus on football Saturdays, roll it out during every halftime performance at Ross-Ade Stadium and thump it throughout each game — the giant percussion instrument that boldly proclaims, right on its face, that it is the "World's Largest Drum."
But is Purdue University's Big Bass Drum truly the biggest?
I scoured the Internet, figuring the drum's dimensions likely were buried on some obscure blog, as most pieces of trivia usually are, only to come up empty. There were lots of estimates for the diameter, but they were decidedly less than precise, ranging from 8 feet to 10 feet.
What I did discover right away was that there's a lot of competition for the title of "World's Largest Drum," which probably explains why Purdue keeps the actual dimensions under its hat, er, shiny steel helmet.
A few drums in Asia and Europe easily tower over the Boilermakers' drum, with the Guinness World Record holder in South Korea measuring in at a diameter of 18 feet 2 inches. Even the naked eye can see Purdue's drum doesn't come close.
What's less clear is whether Purdue's drum beats the competition closer to home.
The University of Texas has Big Bertha, which is 8 feet tall and 44 inches wide, and the University of Missouri boasts Big Mo, which measures in at 9 feet tall and 4 feet, 6 inches wide.....
Inside an aging metal cabinet on the first floor was a square paper boxed labeled "Lafayette Journal & Courier — No. 474." We gently placed the roll of microfilm in a nearby reader.
Smith quickly scrolled through the film, slowing down when he reached the 1921 newspapers — the year the drum was built by Leedy Manufacturing Co. We glanced through Journal & Courier issues from May, June and July before coming to Aug. 6, the day after the Big Bass Drum was unveiled.
And there were the drum's dimensions, right on the front page: "Seven feet three inches in diameter and three feet nine inches wide."

Never trust somebody from Indiana.  One of the things I was going to do if I won the lottery was commission the construction of a bigger drum than the one Purdue has, just to stick it to them.  But since the Universities of Texas and Missouri already have, I won't bother if I hit it big.  Seriously, who lies about the size of their drum?

Ron Burgundy + Curling = Awesome

The Atlantic Wire:

In what could be the best publicity stunt yet for Anchorman 2 so far (and there have been some great ones), Will Ferrell's Ron Burgundy is going to Winnipeg to cover curling.
Yes, Burgundy will be the "newest member of the TSN team" (that's "The Sports Network," or Canada's version of ESPN) while the channel broadcasts the 2013 Roar of the Rings, which, from what I can tell, is a big deal in the world of Canadian curling. Whoever wins the event goes to the Olympics!

Could they simulcast this on NBC Sports Network?  I'd tune in.

Health Care Cost Vs. Life Expectancy

This is American Exceptionalism:

Ridiculous.  We have typically used about 20-25% of all the electricity and oil produced in the world, I wonder what percentage of developed world heath care expenditures we make?  About the same amount?

NASA Photo of the Day

Today:

Comet Hale-Bopp Over Indian Cove
Image Credit & Copyright: Wally Pacholka (Astropics, TWAN) Explanation: Comet Hale-Bopp, the Great Comet of 1997, was quite a sight. In the above photograph taken on 1997 April 6, Comet Hale-Bopp was imaged from the Indian Cove Campground in the Joshua Tree National Park in California, USA. A flashlight was used to momentarily illuminate foreground rocks in this six minute exposure. An impressive blue ion tail was visible above a sunlight-reflecting white dust tail. Comet Hale-Bopp remained visible to the unaided eye for over a year before returning to the outer Solar System and fading. As Comet ISON approaches the Sun this week, sky enthusiasts around the Earth are waiting to see if its tails will become even more spectacular than those displayed by Comet Hale-Bopp.

Hopefully, Comet ISON won't lead to castrations and mass suicide.

Grey Cup Today

Well, since the Bengals are on their bye week, maybe I'll watch some of the Grey Cup game:

The Saskatchewan Roughriders will attempt to become the third consecutive Canadian Football League team to capture a championship on their home field when they face the Hamilton Tiger-Cats at the 101st Grey Cup at Mosaic Stadium in Regina.
TSN's pre-game coverage gets underway at 1pm et/10am pt, with kickoff at 6pm et/3pm pt. You can also follow TSN's digital platforms throughout the game with in-game highlights and TSN.ca's GameTracker.
To follow in the footsteps of the 99th Grey Cup Champion B.C. Lions and 100th Grey Cup Champion Toronto Argonauts, the Roughriders are going to have to beat a team that took an almost identical route to the title game as them in the Tiger-Cats.
Both teams finished second in their respective division and after earning home semi-final victories, were forced to go on the road as underdogs to book their places in the final.
In the West title game, the Roughriders knocked off the Calgary Stampeders 35-13, leading from the mid-point of the opening quarter right to the final whistle.
After opening the regular season by winning eight of their first nine games, the Roughriders struggled through the second half of the campaign before getting things back on track heading into the playoffs.
The Tiger-Cats, meanwhile, overturned a halftime deficit in the East Final to knock off the defending champion Argonauts and get to the Grey Cup.

In the States, the game will be on NBC Sports Network at 6 o'clock.  I'll pull for the home team, playing at Mosaic Stadium.  How many NFL stadiums are named for potash mining companies? I think zero.

Georgia Southern Runs Over Florida

ESPN:

Kevin Ellison ran for two touchdowns, Jerick McKinnon had a huge score late and four-touchdown underdog Georgia Southern stunned Florida 26-20 Saturday without completing a pass.
No lower-division team had ever beaten the Gators, who won their previous seven games against Football Championship Subdivision teams by an average of 45 points.
So this was a shocker, even though Florida (4-7) lost its sixth consecutive game and secured its first losing season since 1979.
"Very disappointed for our program, an embarrassment (to be) in this situation," Gators coach Will Muschamp said. "It's all disappointing. It's hard to measure it at this point."
Georgia Southern (7-4) ran for 429 yards -- all of the team's offense and the most against Florida since Nebraska rolled up 524 in the 1996 Fiesta Bowl. The Eagles also became the first team this season to beat an FBS team without completing a pass. They were 0 for 3.
McKinnon finished with 125 yards rushing, including a 14-yard touchdown with 2:57 remaining. Ellison added 118 yards on the ground, scoring on runs of 45 and 1. Fullback William Banks also gashed the Gators, getting 94 yards up the middle. His 53-yarder on a third-and-2 play set up the winning score.
Florida had a chance to win it, thanks partly to two missed extra points.
Skyler Mornhinweg, making his second consecutive start in place of Tyler Murphy (shoulder), got the Gators in scoring territory, but his final two throws fell incomplete. He had Quinton Dunbar open in the corner of the end zone on third down from the 17, but his pass floated high. He tried to force one to Solomon Patton on the final play, but two defenders broke it up.

Wow, a Division I-AA (soon to be I-A, I'm not going in for FCS and FBS) school comes into Gainesville and beats Florida without completing a pass.  That is amazing.  I knew Florida was bad this year, but I didn't realize they were that bad.

Big Ag's Losing Fight on Ethanol

Des Moines Register:

With billions of dollars of potential profit on the line, ethanol producers, corn growers and other groups know they have a tough road ahead and a limited window in which to change the thinking of the EPA and White House officials overseeing the mandate, known as the Renewable Fuel Standard. The law requires refiners to buy alternative fuels made from corn, soybeans and other products. The EPA proposal will be open to a 60-day comment period; the agency is expected to finalize the rule in the spring of 2014.
Biofuel producers have wasted little time trying to get their message through to the Obama administration. On Wednesday, just five days after the measure was made public, representatives of Growth Energy, the Renewable Fuels Association, ethanol maker Poet, the National Corn Growers Association and others met with Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, White House staff and EPA officials. The industry representatives underscored the damaging impact the proposal would have on the future of biofuels.
Vilsack said administration officials told the biofuels industry they remain committed to the renewable fuels requirement and “understand the importance of it” for offering consumer choice, creating jobs, reducing the country’s dependence on foreign energy and saving motorists money at the pump. The former Iowa governor said more needs to be done to expand consumer access to higher-grade ethanol blends such as E85, which includes 85 percent of the corn-based fuel.
Critics of the EPA proposal contend they must act to prevent a permanent shift in the way blend levels are determined. In the past, the EPA largely followed the annual level requirements put in place by Congress, helping to drive new markets and spur demand for the renewable fuel. The proposed reduction — a move even some in the oil industry have called substantive — would shift the process to one that sets the requirements based on expected market demand.

The ethanol mandate was bad policy growing out of diminishing conventional oil production and high gasoline prices.  The skew it has made in commodity prices fueled a farm land price bubble and has wreaked havoc in livestock production.  With shale oil production spiking, fuel economy improving and miles driven per licensed driver falling, Big Ag has run into a more powerful foe, Big Oil.  If I'm a betting man (and I am), I'd wager on Big Oil.

Another Chicago Privatization Disaster?

This time, it is fare cards for CTA:

But while these privatization debacles have been hard to stomach, Ventra — the new, privatized fare collection system for transit in Chicago — has been nothing short of a complete disaster.
Unlike the old magnetic strip fare card system, Ventra requires riders to purchase a prepaid debit/credit card that doubles as a transit pass. Whereas fare collection has been under public control for the entire lifespan of the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), officials recently signed a $454 million deal to turn over fare collection to Cubic Corporation, a multinational firm which, in addition to causing transit fare headaches all over the world, is also a major player in military equipment manufacturing.
Since Ventra went live this fall, nearly every aspect of the new system has been a fiasco. Transit riders are routinely double- and triple-charged for fares, only to find that the process of sorting things out — waiting more than 30 minutes (on average) in the hopes of speaking with an overworked out-of-state employee in a call center — is often worse than throwing in the towel and moving on. A few weeks back, news broke that bus riders were being charged not only for boarding buses, but for exiting them as well.
While some are lucky enough to avoid being overcharged, others can’t get charged even when they want to. In theory, all you need do to board a bus or move through the turnstiles is tap your Ventra card once against a card-reader. But, in practice, it’s never quite clear what’s in store for you—or for all those similarly anxious folks waiting in line ahead of you.
Will it take four or fives taps before have the green light to board? Will it say “processing” indefinitely, as you wait awkwardly at the front of the bus? Will it stubbornly bark “Stop!” when you tap it, even though you just loaded money onto it? Or, miraculously, will you be able to stroll through the turnstiles in seconds and go about your business? With Ventra in place, its a gamble every time Chicagoans try to board a train or bus—a gamble that, as a quick glance at tweets tagged with #VentraVents confirms, much of the city is losing.

Other than further enriching those who don't need it, I've never understood the push for privatization.  It is pretty obvious that ANY cost savings in privatization (which never seem to materialize) are made by cutting pay for workers, who are generally working-class or middle-class, and turned into profits for shareholders and massive pay packages for executives.  I generally don't have much trouble at the BMV, so I'm not sure why private companies assume they can be so inefficient in setting up privatized operations.  It is pretty clear that privatized services almost always end up with fee increases and greater costs to end users, but without benefiting workers who live in the neighborhoods that are served.  Hopefully, such privatization failures like this curb the trend, but that wouldn't benefit our corporate masters.

The Short, Tough Life of Turkeys

Business Insider goes through the steps of a turkey's life, from artificial insemination to slaughter.  Here's a step I'd never known of, preparation for debeaking:

Hatching is only the beginning of a turkey's journey through industrial processing.
The chicks in this picture are being exposed to high-intensity light and partially microwaved to prepare for a routine surgery.
What surgery?
Having their beaks and talons cut off.
The beaks aren't necessary for eating, and they might scratch other turkeys.  Same for talons. So off they go!
As they get softened up to have their beaks and talons chopped off, some chicks fall from a conveyor belt or slide and are literally crushed in the machine, according to a hatchery investigation by Compassion Over Killing.

Not sure what exactly the high-intensity light and microwaves do for preparing the birds for surgery, but that is a wild looking machine.  The whole feature draws heavily on PETA and HSUS information.  However, I'm not sure that Big Ag could really do anything to make the process sound much better.  They've had a long time to explain away gestation crates, but their arguments don't seem to convince many folks who don't live on farms.

A Conservative Solar Power War?

The New Republic:

Clean energy technology has always been an easy punching bag for conservatives. Propelled by growing strain of global warming denial within their party, Republicans in Congress have proposed to slash funding for renewable energy programs in half this year, and mocked the idea of a green economy as “groovy” liberal propaganda. Their argument, as laid out by House Republicans and libertarian organs like the Cato Institute and Reason magazine, is that the federal government shouldn’t “pick winners and losers” in the energy markets or gamble taxpayer dollars on renewable-energy loans to companies like Solyndra, the Silicon Valley solar panel manufacturer that went bankrupt in 2011 after receiving $535 million in federal loan guarantees. The assumption has always been that, without heavy government subsidies, renewable energy sources like solar and wind power would never be able to compete with fossil fuels.

But something funny has happened to renewables that major power companies and their Republican allies didn’t see coming. Over the past two years, the solar industry has skyrocketed, with one new solar unit installed every four minutes in the US, according to the renewable energy research group Greentech Media. The price of photovoltaic panels has fallen 62 percent since January 2011. Once considered a boutique energy source, solar power has become a cost-competitive alternative for many consumers, costing an average $143 per megawatt-hour, down from $236 in the beginning of 2011. Backed by powerful conservative groups, public utilities in several states are now pushing to curb the solar industry, and asking regulators to raise fees and impose new restrictions on solar customers. And as more people turn to rooftop solar as a way to reduce energy costs—90,000 businesses and homeowners installed panels last year, up 46 percent from 2011—the issue is pitting pro-utilities Republicans against this fledgling movement of libertarian-minded activists who see independent power generation as an individual right. In other words, the fight over solar power is raging within the GOP itself.

One of the big breakthroughs in the next decade or so will be how to efficiently balance energy demand and renewable supply.  I would anticipate some upland reservoirs, and maybe hydrolysis of water, along with batteries, may be storage options.  This will be a nice mathematical challenge for grid operators.

Benoit Mandelbrot, The Father of Fractals

The Threat Posed by Antibiotic Resistance

Maryn McKenna:

If we really lost antibiotics to advancing drug resistance — and trust me, we’re not far off — here’s what we would lose. Not just the ability to treat infectious disease; that’s obvious.
But also: The ability to treat cancer, and to transplant organs, because doing those successfully relies on suppressing the immune system and willingly making ourselves vulnerable to infection. Any treatment that relies on a permanent port into the bloodstream — for instance, kidney dialysis. Any major open-cavity surgery, on the heart, the lungs, the abdomen. Any surgery on a part of the body that already harbors a population of bacteria: the guts, the bladder, the genitals. Implantable devices: new hips, new knees, new heart valves. Cosmetic plastic surgery. Liposuction. Tattoos.
We’d lose the ability to treat people after traumatic accidents, as major as crashing your car and as minor as your kid falling out of a tree. We’d lose the safety of modern childbirth: Before the antibiotic era, 5 women died out of every 1,000 who gave birth. One out of every nine skin infections killed. Three out of every 10 people who got pneumonia died from it.
And we’d lose, as well, a good portion of our cheap modern food supply. Most of the meat we eat in the industrialized world is raised with the routine use of antibiotics, to fatten livestock and protect them from the conditions in which the animals are raised. Without the drugs that keep livestock healthy in concentrated agriculture, we’d lose the ability to raise them that way. Either animals would sicken, or farmers would have to change their raising practices, spending more money when their margins are thin. Either way, meat — and fish and seafood, also raised with abundant antibiotics in the fish farms of Asia — would become much more expensive.
And it wouldn’t be just meat. Antibiotics are used in plant agriculture as well, especially on fruit. Right now, a drug-resistant version of the bacterial disease fire blight is attacking American apple crops. There’s currently one drug left to fight it. And when major crops are lost, the local farm economy goes too.

Again, the routine feeding of antibiotics to healthy livestock is a practice that needs to stop.

Moving Between States

Chris Walker made an awesome interactive chart showing migration between states based on 2012 American Community Survey data:

A little explanation of what it shows:

The visualization is a circle cut up into arcs, the light-colored pieces along the edge of the circle, each one representing a state. The arcs are connected to each other by links, and each link represents the flow of people between two states. States with longer arcs exchange people with more states (California and New York, for example, have larger arcs). Links are thicker when there are relatively more people moving between two states. The color of each link is determined by the state that contributes the most migrants, so for example, the link between California and Texas is blue rather than orange, because California sent over 62,000 people to Texas, while Texas only sent about 43,000 people to California. Note that, to keep the graphic clean, I only drew a link between two states if they exchanged at least 10,000 people.

The surprise data point for me is that more Texans moved to Ohio than Ohioans moved to Texas.

Photojournalists on War

Elite Overproduction?

From Bloomberg:

Past waves of political instability, such as the civil wars of the late Roman Republic, the French Wars of Religion and the American Civil War, had many interlinking causes and circumstances unique to their age. But a common thread in the eras we studied was elite overproduction. The other two important elements were stagnating and declining living standards of the general population and increasing indebtedness of the state.
Elite overproduction generally leads to more intra-elite competition that gradually undermines the spirit of cooperation, which is followed by ideological polarization and fragmentation of the political class. This happens because the more contenders there are, the more of them end up on the losing side. A large class of disgruntled elite-wannabes, often well-educated and highly capable, has been denied access to elite positions....This U.S. historical cycle didn’t end with the cataclysm of the Civil War. Huge fortunes were made during the Gilded Age and economic inequality reached a peak, unrivaled even today. The number of lawyers tripled from 1870 to 1910. And the U.S. saw another wave of political violence, spiking in 1919–21.
This was the worst period of political instability in U.S. history, barring the Civil War. Class warfare took the form of violent labor strikes. At one point 10,000 miners armed with rifles were battling against thousands of company troops and sheriff deputies. There was a wave of terrorism by labor radicals and anarchists. Race issues intertwined with class, leading to the Red Summer of 1919, with 26 major riots and more than 1,000 casualties. It was much, much worse than the 1960s and early 1970s, a period many of us remember well because we lived through it (see chart).

That's a pretty interesting take on history.  I think income inequality is a bigger deal than most folks think. Hopefully, the issue can be defused before we have serious political instability.

Farmland

Interesting.

Also interesting, this post at Big Picture Agriculture, on deflation and overproduction of corn, and that impact on the agricultural economy. We've had a nice run on the farm, but I don't think it will last.

Find the Money

Apparently, all of the customer money at MF Global was recovered.  If somebody asks me how it happened, I have no idea.  See if you can figure it out:

Trustee Giddens -- who was also the court-appointed trustee in charge of liquidating Lehman Brothers -- will certainly oppose those motions, however. He, for one, does not share Corzine's belief that recovery of the shortfall implies exoneration of Corzine or any other MF Global officer and director. "The reduction [in the customer account shortfall] that resulted from the Trustee's efforts should not obscure the fact," wrote one of Giddens's staffers in a court filing last month, "that a very real shortfall in the amount of $1.5 billion existed at the time the Trustee began the liquidation process, and it was mainly through litigation and negotiation with affiliates and other third parties that the gap has been reduced."
Last week another attorney working with Giddens stressed in an updated court submission that at least $560 million would still be missing from those customer accounts to this day were it not for the fact that Giddens has plugged that void with "advances" from the general estate, moneys that would otherwise have been available for paying general creditors, such as vendors, suppliers, and service-providers. The last of these was the $233 million injection just approved on Nov. 6 by Bankruptcy Judge Glenn. (The total amount advanced, however, is expected to shrink to somewhere between $435 million and $460 million after one additional expected transfer from the U.K. lands in the kitty in the coming months.)
These advances, in turn, were conditioned on a deal -- whose legality is hotly contested by Corzine and his co-defendants -- that allows trustee Giddens to step into the shoes of the class-action customer claimants and continue litigating their claims against the individual defendants. (The case would actually still be litigated by the class-action attorneys who brought it, though Giddens, as trustee for the general creditors, would now be the beneficiary.)
Giddens is also not backing away from any of the fundamental findings of a 275-page investigative report he issued in June 2012. There he found that there was a basis for asserting "breach of fiduciary duty and negligence" claims against Corzine and other officers, charges that have in fact been leveled against Corzine in the class actions as well as in an enforcement action filed by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission this past June.

I really don't understand how Corzine doesn't face charges.  However, I find it hard to believe that a prosecutor could convince somebody that he committed a crime.  This is the most confusing story I've ever heard.

Melancholia

Melancholia from Enrique Pacheco on Vimeo.

Income Inequality Chart of the Day

From John Cassidy:

There Are Holes in this Airplane

Boeing adds miniscule holes to make the 777X more efficient:

Boeing’s new 777X is getting a lot of attention for its composite wing with folding tips and its super-efficient engines, but one of the airliner’s most innovative features are the tiny holes in its tail that smooth airflow and improve fuel efficiency.
The holes help smooth airflow around the tail by improving something called laminar flow, basically making the airplane more aerodynamic, which reduces fuel consumption. “Aerodynamic advances such as a hybrid laminar flow control vertical tail,” are the few words Boeing used to describe it in a press release announcing the 777X, Boeing’s impressive updating of its long-range twin-engine airliner. Boeing is working with NASA to further develop the idea to include “sweeping jet actuators” embedded in the tail of future models. Such advancements in airflow manipulation could bring significant fuel savings.
Laminar flow occurs when when air flows smoothly over a surface. Think of a water flowing smoothly around a large, smooth round rock. The water flows easily, and the water appears glassy. But if the rock is jagged or the water is flowing fast enough, turbulent eddies form. The same thing happens at the micro scale as an airplane moves through the air, and that turbulent flow increases drag. Increased drag leads to increased fuel consumption.
The challenge is that laminar flow is difficult to maintain over the entire surface of a wing or tail. As the air flows past the leading edge, it becomes more turbulent, separating from the surface and increasing drag.
Boeing has come up with an innovative solution with its hybrid laminar flow control system, but is keeping most of the details under wraps. The company is using a similar innovation on the 787-9, the stretched version of the Dreamliner, providing a few clues. Tiny holes covering the unpainted leading edge of the 787-9′s vertical tail are used to control the airflow over the surface (the leading edge of the vertical tail on the 777X in the artist rendition at top is also unpainted). Turbulent airflow is reduced through suction as air pulls the turbulent layer through the small holes. This technique has been researched for decades (.pdf), including research by NASA on the F-16XL and more recently by Boeing rival Airbus on an A320 test aircraft in the late 1990s. By ingesting the turbulent layer of air through the tiny holes, the overall drag over the tail surface is reduced.

Interesting. Talk of laminar flow puts me back in fluids lab.

The Other Ford Brother

Lots of people see the resemblance:

Cassini or Curiosity?

NASA considers where in its robotic exploration budget to cut:

This year NASA received $16.9 billion, which may sound like a lot but, once adjusted for inflation, is roughly what the agency got back in 1986. Just $1.27 billion of that budget goes into funding all robotic exploration in the solar system. And most space policy experts don’t see that number going up anytime in the near future. In 2014, NASA will put many of its robotic missions through what’s known as a senior review. Administrators will have to decide which of its missions will yield the highest scientific return and may recommend canceling some of them.
And that’s where some sad calculus comes in.
“We have two very expensive flagship missions, Cassini and Curiosity,” said NASA’s planetary science director Jim Green, speaking to one of the agency’s advisory councils on Nov. 5. “So, this particular competition we’ll have to do very carefully.”ou wouldn’t think the Cassini spacecraft, in orbit around Saturn since 2004, was in trouble. It has lately been beaming back incredible data about the planet’s rings and moons. A recent image from the mission (above) showing Earth, Venus, and Mars from Saturn was widely shared on the internet and even landed on the front page of the New York Times last week.
But NASA seems to want to focus its dwindling energy on Mars.....Most in the planetary science community would bet that in a head-to-head competition, Cassini loses. That would be a shame. Cassini has already been an incredible mission, and scientists estimate it has at least four more years of life left in it. Cassini’s operating budget is about $60 million per year while Curiosity’s runs to roughly $50 million. That’s about what the Department of Defense has budgeted for 3-D printer research and is less than half of what it’s estimated to spend maintaining its golf courses. The Cassini mission has already cost $3.26 billion to launch and operate.

You know, to come up with that $60 million, maybe we could trim back the dividend tax cut, which costs the government over $20 billion a year.  But hey, who needs science research when super rich folks need lower tax rates on unearned income than what working stiffs pay on earned income.

The New Fear at the Bayou Corne Sinkhole

Fire:

A Louisiana sinkhole that has sucked in trees and swamps as it spread to the size of 20 football fields is now at risk of exploding.
Residents of Bayou Corne were evacuated a year ago when the sinkhole, which is emitting natural gases, opened up.
The gas exploration company that has been blamed for causing the problem after a mine collapsed, has resorted to digging relief wells to try to disperse the gas...While no homes have yet been sucked in, officials warn that the gases being emitted could ignite, which would leave the Louisiana swamp looking like 'the gates of Hell'.
In a similar case, a crater caused by Soviet geologists drilling in Turkmenistan in the 1970s has been a fiery pit for more than 40 years after the natural gases being released were lit.
The Louisiana sinkhole, which is expected to expand to 50 acres, is currently 25 acres wide and 350ft deep in some points. Methane bubbling up from it has also escaped into an aquifer.
Experts fear that if oil and gas rising to the surface became trapped it could build up in a crevice and then explode.

Check out this picture from Turkmenistan:

 If the natural gas ignited the sinkhole could become like the Door to Hell in Turkmenistan, which has been alight for 40 years

More on the Louisiana sinkhole here.

NASA Photo of the Day

November 12:

 The Unexpected Tails of Asteroid P5
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (UCLA) et al. Explanation: What is happening to asteroid P/2013 P5? No one is sure. For reasons unknown, the asteroid is now sporting not one but six discernible tails. The above images were taken two months ago by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescopeand show the rapidly changing dust streams. It is not even known when P5 began displaying such unusual tails. Were the main belt asteroid struck by a large meteor, it would be expected to sport a single dust tail. Possible explanations include that light pressure from the Sun is causing the asteroid to rotate increasingly rapidly, which in turn causes pools of previously gravity-bound dust to spin off. Future observations should better indicate how P5 and its dust plumes are evolving and so provide more clues to its nature -- and to how many similar asteroids might exist.

Kahn's Big Red Smokeys

Thanks to the generous assistance of commenter Brian, who shared this link, I have this classic bit of Cincinnati Reds history:

If only I could come up with the soundtrack to go with it. (if it isn't playing, click on it)

A Week at the Listowel Races

Charles Pierce goes to the land of his grandmother to experience an event which her stories had made so real that it was like he'd been there numerous times before he'd ever gone.  It is a wonderful story of farm life, traditional Irish life, family lines and life in general, with horse races, booze and gambling thrown in:

Up and down the round, green-quilted hillsides near Listowel in north Kerry in Ireland, the seven sisters of the Lynch family once tended their sheep. They worked in the summer sun and in the soft rain of the spring and the fall, and in the harder, snow-mixed sleet of midwinter. And every autumn, right around when the harvest came in, they would drive their sheep up the hillsides and down, and straight into Listowel, where their flock would join cows and goats and chickens and ducks, and the sheep of a hundred other families, all milling around with each other and filling the town square with an amazing cacophony of lowing, bleating, squawking, and quacking that nearly, but not quite, drowned out the increasingly lubricated haggling of the farmers and craftsmen and merchants who had come to sell enough of what they'd raised and grown and manufactured to get them through the hard winter to come, with a little left over to spend in the pubs on William Street, or to bet on the horses out at the track tucked into the bend of the river. The sisters never went to the races. Only the men went to the races. The sisters stayed in town and listened to the fiddlers and the people who played the pipes, and they danced with each other after the day's business was done.
Listowel was a farm town, a market town. It was a little less polished than Tralee to the west and the south, or Limerick to the north and east. It was louder. It was rougher. One of the Lynch sisters, Mary Ellen, would talk in her later years of a rally in support of Charles Stewart Parnell at the time of the split in the Irish Party over Parnell's affair with Kitty O'Shea. The rally turned into an all-out brawl, the clack of hurleys on skulls ringing louder than the oratory. Called "faction fights," these were come-all-ye bloodlettings, exhibitions of what the Irish called the bataireacht, a form of stick-fighting that rose to an art. These would erupt at weddings or at funerals, or at virtually any public occasion at which a longstanding grievance might detonate at the smallest provocation.

Ok, harvest fair.  Sounds about like the origins of county fairs.  Discussing with his guide how he felt like he knew the place and was a part of it because of his grandmother's stories, he gives a good insight into the importance of narrative, in this case, sports as narrative, in our lives:

I am of this place, because my grandmother was of this place, and she told me about it, and so it became part of what I am...
"When you come right down to it," Pat told me, "running a racetrack is like running a farm. That's why the races here have survived. It was the last thing the farmers had for the year. Once the races ended, there was only the long, cold winter."
What are sports, anyway, at their best, but stories played out in real time? Each of them has a distant beginning, a middle, and an end, all three connected by the slender, powerful tendrils of memories recited. They are part of the collective memory of the tribe. They are how we explain ourselves to each other, down through the generations. Once upon a time, there were five sisters on the hills around Listowel, and one of them had a son, who gave her a grandson. From her, I had imagined hearing the muffled power of the hooves pounding into the turf. I had imagined the soft-running river. I never had been to the Listowel Races, but I had been there all my life.

The whole story is wonderful, and I recommend it to anyone with an interest in Ireland or horse racing, or having fun in general.  On this day of the Bengals-Browns game, his description of his grandmother's stories and the recognition of sports as narrative, I think his story explains every western Ohio Browns fan (and there's a lot of them, way too many, actually) I have ever met.  The reason that is is because they are only Browns fans because their fathers, and most likely, their grandfathers were.  Their grandfathers told the stories about Paul Brown and Otto Graham, Lou Groza and Marion Motley.  They were told the glorious tales of the Browns when the Browns won the NFL Championship in their first year in the NFL, after winning four AAFC titles.  Their fathers probably remember the last championship in 1964, with Jim Brown running over opponents.  I understand how they became Browns fans, I just don't understand why they remained Browns fans after Art Modell packed up the Browns and moved to Baltimore.  I would have expected them to remain fans of the Ravens (ok, probably not) or to have become fans of some other team.  Why would folks in Western Ohio choose to wait 3 years to follow an expansion team almost 3 hours from where they live?  That I don't understand.

Mayor Ford on 60 Minutes

At least SNL's version of it:


Update: A more serious look at the Toronto mayor's recent lunacy.

Not-Quite Border War

In the buildup to the big Chiefs-Broncos game, the Kansas City Star goes looking for the boundary between Chiefs fans and Broncos fans:

So, we ask Donnie, have we crossed the Chiefs-Broncos dividing line here in Ellis?
“I’d say a little further west.”

---

WaKeeney, Kan., is the geographic midway point between Kansas City and Denver, each about 300 miles away.
From this town and for the next 70 miles west, toward Colby, we hear people say “50/50” when asked about the breakdown of Chiefs and Broncos fans.
Granted, “50/50” is a safe, off-the-cuff estimate in a region so distant from big-time sports centers. After all, newspapers in western Kansas emphasize high school athletics. Many NFL fans back neither Denver nor Kansas City.
At Twisters II Bar & Grill in WaKeeney, customer Dick Dykema dons a Minnesota Vikings stocking cap.
“Lived here 30 years,” he said, “but I came from North Dakota. Close enough to Minnesota.”
Plenty of Dallas Cowboy fans here, too. Also Oakland fans, Pittsburgh fans.
But it’s all Chiefs versus Broncos this night at Twisters II.

---

In Goodland, Kan., 18 miles east of the Colorado border, it’s too obvious.
We’re in Mountain Standard Time. Goodlanders can get Denver’s NBC affiliate on cable TV. McDonald’s serves beverages in cups bearing the Broncos’ horse-head logo.
It’s Kansas, sure. But Jacque’s Hallmark shop hasn’t a stitch of Chiefs paraphernalia to go with the Broncos body stickers and toothbrush holders.
Hallmark clerk Mary Jane Sponsel doesn’t blink: “We have mostly Bronco fans.”

It would seem like Facebook's map is a good breakdown of where main loyalties lie:

Of course, there is a huge minority of Browns fans in SW Ohio, but I would guess that this map gives a pretty good estimate of what the majority thinks.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/11/16/4628198/across-kansas-where-broncos-country.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/11/16/4628198/across-kansas-where-broncos-country.html#storylink=cpy

Fast Food Workers and Social Welfare Programs

The Wall Street Journal looks at the issue (h/t Ritholtz):

One point that isn't disputed: $7 billion isn't much, in the context of the U.S. fast-food industry and of government benefits. It is about one-fifth or one-quarter as much as fast-food restaurants pay their front-line workers in wages and benefits. And it is less than 2% of the total benefits paid out by the four programs studied by the researchers.

Why, then, focus on fast food? "$7 billion is $7 billion. You have to start somewhere," Dr. Allegretto said, adding that the proportion of fast-food workers who receive benefits from those programs—52%—is larger than in other major industry categories she and her colleagues studied.

Dr. Allegretto said the figure is an underestimate, for several reasons. First, there is no ready-made data set of fast-food workers, so researchers used three different sources and several assumptions. "We always erred on the side of being conservative," she said. The researchers also omitted many other benefits programs.

Some economists praised the research, which hasn't yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. "They produced the best estimates available using sound methods and data," said Aaron J. Sojourner, a labor economist at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota.

I find it interesting that the two industries with the highest percentage of employees who had family members on social welfare programs were both food production or provision industries.  So does that have something to do with the government subsidizing cheap food?  I don't see how, when profits for the companies have increased over time.  I think this does have to do with the half-assed employer-based health care system we have, and the fact that the restaurant industry has long used part-time help that they stiffed on health insurance.  I would be curious to know what would happen if we got an increased minimum wage combined with a tax on large businesses that don't provide health insurance based on their total number of part-time and full-time workers.  I would expect they might cut part-time employees, but dramatically increase full-time workers.  In the end, an employer-based system doesn't work if an increasing number of employers don't provide insurance.  Since we are there, we need to work out a different system.

Land Price Crest?

This chart is open to that interpretation (from Big Picture Agriculture):

 With already falling grain prices, the bearish impact of the ethanol mandate reduction, lack of interest from Wall Street, higher interest rates due to eventual Fed tapering and increasing fear of  deflation, I think land prices will face severe headwinds going forward.  I would call a secular agricultural land price peak for the time frame between harvest 2012 and harvest 2013.

2013 National Geographic Photo Contest

Via The Atlantic, National Geographic's photo contest for this year is here.  One of my favorites:

Fall Moose: I was fortunate to come across this moose having his evening meal in the Snake River, in Wyoming. He had chosen an excellent backdrop for his dining and the least I could do was get a snapshot of it. (© Glen Hush/National Geographic Photo Contest) #

Ray Mancini on the Duk Koo Kim Fight

The BBC interviews Ray Mancini on the fateful fight 31 years ago this week:

On 13 November 1982, reigning WBA lightweight world champion, Ray 'Boom Boom' Mancini was due to defend his title against challenger, the South Korean Kim Deuk-koo.
In Mancini's words it was going to be an "action fight" in front of a 15,000-strong crowd at Las Vegas's fabled Caesar's Palace venue. Millions more were tuning in at home on TV.
It was a fight that Mancini went on to win but his opponent suffered fatal injuries that would cause great controversy and change the sport.
Thirty-one years on from that fateful night, Ray Mancini talks about the fight.

The video is at the link (no embed feature).  More on the fight and its impact here.